"In Velatropa Far away
though devoid of mind's full sway
in measured form with rhythmic heart
all that's done is done as art."
Report filed:
AhKa IV, Commander, Space Cocoon Surveillance Spore, Velatropan Vector
To: Central Hierarch Vanguard, Arcturus 108x.
I realize I have been sorely remiss in my reports for a number of centuries now-on Velatropa 24.3, called by the locals "earth," a hundred revolutions around the central star comprise a century. In any case, it is imperative that you receive an update on critical developments occurring on the Art Planet, Velatropa 24.3.
It's been some five centuries now since the intelligence here attained incipient globalization-but under the greediest and most spurious of circumstances. Gold and the need for ideological domination, that's what brought it about. Disgusting!
Within two centuries mechanized industrialization was established, and with that event -goodness, did that speed things upi - the collective art spores all but disintegrated. All knowledge became bent to the end of increasing materialism. When material goods can't be acquired by forthright plunder or diplomacy, then it's war. In fact, I have been appalled at the degree to which war has replaced the arting ends of this planet.
But don't let me get ahead of myself. I should say a few more words about the manner in which Velatropa 24.3 has arted.
It took some four billion stellar revolutions of cooling off and numerous biospheric experimentations before this planet evolved a type of being skillful enough to carry the art enzymes and to deploy them in a manner beneficial to the establishment of a unitary consciousness.
Beginning some 50,000 stellar revolutions ago, through the medium of these beings-they call themselves human or earthlingsthe planet began to art in a consistent manner. Having spread a fine membrane of art over the planet, well over one hundred centuries past, these beings initiated experiments in agriculture. This provided the base for what they came to call "civilization." There were six independent sites where this civilizing process erupted on the planet surface, Though "individual" civilizations were generally unaware of all of the others, and hence each developed a false sense of uniqueness, from the Arcturian perspective, there is no question that civilization is a single planetary phenomenon. What distinguishes civilization as a geological phase of Velatropa 24.3, is its artfulness. As humans are the civilizing carriers of the art enzyme, artiers is the rightful name for these beings.
Well, not meaning to be tedious or redundant, suffice it to say that these artiers, more unconsciously than consciously, for several thousand stellar revolutions, through their civilizing efforts, allowed the planet to art in a variety of styles and forms. Though the aggressive behavior known as war inevitably developed as a result of the false sense of territorial uniqueness, still, there was enough down here of what's called a "spiritual force" to keep things in balance.
All of that changed, ironically enough, with the onset of incipient globalization. As I've already mentioned, with the spread of industrialization, it seemed almost certain that war would replace art, and with that seal the Art Planet's doom.
During this dark, downward turn of events, a handful of artiers rose to the occasion of championing art as the Voice of the Earth. These industrial age artiers came to be known as romantics. This strange, half-demented lot of misfits intoxicated by the pathos of their own situation, nevertheless kept alive the flame of art. At least, they were moved by some recollection of human vision cooperating with the urges of the earth ... and this was much more than could be said of the Dark Lords of Matter who ascended to power at that time ...
However, by the dawn of the third century of industrialization, following a disastrous war (World War 1, they called it), even the romantic began to stray, dear me, into the confused byways of his mind, choked with the weeds of disparate and erroneous concepts. Trapped as they were in urban zones, these romantics, sadly enough, had begun to lose touch with the Voice of the Earth.
Following the indescribable turning point of Hiroshima culminating their "Second World War," (my, such a pathetic misuse of globalizationi) most of the originally romantically inspired artiers had lost contact with the Voice of the Earth, not to mention the Starry Dynamo of night!
As the romantic pose turned into urban guerilla art dogma, the need became ever more clear: if the Art Planet was to attain its true destiny, a new call had to be issued. Instead of romantic, the downtrodden, starving, rebellious artier needed a new image, a new role, a new sense of purpose ... It was just at that moment, when the basest minds held the highest positions in planetary affairs and were befuddling people's lives with threats of total war known as "peace through strength," that the newly formed Planet Art Network (PAN) issued its first RTA Weather Report, "The Romant-Geomant Transposition." So let us turn to that decisive geomantic proclamation for a brighter take on a great evolutionar,y moment for our old favorite, the Art Planet, Velatropa 24.3:
Issued by: RTA Contingent, Planet Art Network, Romant-Geomant
Transposition.
While the Post-Atomic Romant Front is dissipating in confused pockets of entropic individualism, the new Front is effecting a synthesis of all previous stages manifest by the art enzyme. At the same time, the naturally occuring synthesis is synergizing a re-grouping of artiers into collectives known as Art-Spores. Since the focus of the Art-Spores is the harmonious and skillfully compassionate uplifting of the total planet, to the end of enabling it to cast its VOTE (Voice of the Earth) among other luminaries in this galaxy, the new Front takes on the designation, Geomantic. Sprouting from the timelessness of the Aboriginal Continuity, geomancy refers to the process of divining, knowing, and acting through signs, lines, and designs manifest by planet earth.
Through the classic agricultural civilizations and the subsequent era of mystic exaltation, geomancy provided the perfect fusion between what were later to be called art and science. It was only during the dreadful Industrial Ascendency that geomancy all but disappeared as a legitimate force in the unfolding of civilization. Only the romantic had any recollection of the force and nature of geomancy. Yet even for the romantic, geomancy was much more a matter of nostalgia than a truth to be acted upon. But all of that is over now.
With the issuance of this Weather Report, we, the RTAs - Resident Terrestrial Agents-sound the alert: this is the moment of the Romant-Geomant Transposition! Since there is no man or woman who does not possess the art enzyme, there is virtually no one incapable of responding to the advent of the Geomant Front. Only the build-up of psychic hardware from previous stages can determine how long it will be before a given individual will respond to the Synthesizing Geomant Front. In the meantime, those whose perceptual passageways are not so sand-bagged by materialistic distortions are now being imprinted with the dire but joyous responsibility to join in the process of amalgamating into Art-Spores.
Take heed, and have no fear! Join the ranks of the RTAs in forming the Planet Art Network! Art Now! War no More! With the heart of a warrior, make the art that heals! No split between art and life, art and science, art and politics! Art is the way of the RTA! Know who you arel The Geomant Front is already upon usl Art Now! War no More!
This Weather Report issued in benign aspiration for the intelligent furtherance of all sentient beings.
Well, beloved CHV, that encapsulates my own Report. Since the broadcasting of the RTA Weather Report, my work is certainly going to go somewhat easier. After all, it is always with the greatest gratification that we observe another planet casting its VOTE!
Although its behavior may seem random or even perverse much of the time, the art of our planet is a fluid system, subject to natural laws governing the behavior of all matter and energy. Aided by tools such as computers, radar, and satellites, we have extended our ability to express art and have come to understand that its behavior involves myriad interactions from the microscopic to the global, extending to the sun and interplanetary space.
Planet art first emerged during the last Ice Age. With the onset of the holocene era over 12,000 years ago it became an integral feature of human culture. First through ritual, then through monumental temple building and the related crafts, planet art began to articulate the convective flow of culture at certain key points on the planet: Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, China, Mexico and Peru. This flow spread, creating cultural interactions of varying sorts, and finally expanded to cover the globe through an electrical network of increasing subtlety and sophistication.
It was during the period of global industrialization (1800-2000 AD) that planet art underwent its greatest transformation. Despite some valid experimentation, in general all local systems were disrupted by the intrusion of machine industry and electronic media. In nations of the capitalist economic persuasion art was translated into commercial enterprise; artists were encouraged to compete rather than to associate collectively. In nations where a communist economy prevailed, art became the tool of state propaganda and was expressed through outmoded bourgeois forms.
By 1967 a major crisis erupted. In the capitalist centers art reached a condition of Maximum Commercial Entropy. In the communist centers a massive artists' strike brought about a condition of Total Aesthetic Stalemate. These phenomena were symptomatic of the larger situation, the Great Global Crisis of the last two decades of the 20th century, during which the collapse of most social systems, aggravated by increasing warfare and by economic breakdown, all but put an end to Global Industrial Civilization.
It was at this time that a genuinely planetar art came into existence. It all began in the fateful year, 1987. Significantly enough, the initial activity occurred in conjunction with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) facility in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the heart of the North American Continent. As the nerve center of one of the most sophisticated planetary scientific networks, charged with monitoring global and extra-teffestrial climatic changes, the NCAR facility had become increasingly vital after the intensifying volcanic and seismic activity that resulted in the monumental Pacific Tectonic Plate Shift of 1986.
Two pioneer groups operating in the NCAR area met during the first new moon of February 1987:
Explorers of the Richness of the Phenomenal World (ERPW) and the World Union of the Guardians of Aesthetic Evolution (WUGAE). Through a contract with NCAR, the two groups were able to use the vast communication system to begin uniting artists in other major planetary centers, thus instituting the Global Arts Monitoring Mission Act (GAMMA). Through this Act, the ERPW and the WUGAE successfully put together and communicated the famous Planetary Art and Energy Bulletin of 1987. As the foundation of all succeeding artistic activity, the basic points of that Bulletin are worth repeating here:
1. Art is a function of energy. Given the unity of humankind as a single planetary organism, art is the expressive connective tissue binding together the individual organisms through energy transformations focussed in the emotional centers of those organisms. Emotional energy is the expressive or outward moving manifestation of vital or biopsychic energy. Properly catalyzed through form, rhythm, color, light, sound, and movement, emotional energy is directly related to the establishment of a dynamic equilibrium with the other forces of the phenomenal world, from the microscopic to the galactic levels. In other words, there can be no proper management of energy at whatever level and for whatever use without bringing into proper deployment the energy system of art. When art disfunctions all systems ultimately disfunction. According to William Blake, 'Art degraded, Imagination denied, War governs the Nations.'
2. No genuine art without transformation of self. Given the nature of art as a function of energy, we find that art, energy and health are integrally related. If the maker of art is not convinced of his or her own sanity and basic goodness and is not working on ways to bring his or her total being into line with the universal energy spectrum, then the resultant art effect (artifact) will be incomplete and quite possibly destructive of health. Transform-ition of self is alignment of personal organismic energy with the total energy spectrum, coupled with the acquisition of whatever skills are necessary to communicate quality and depth of feeling and insight through whatever means.
3. Openness of individual breeds collective aesthetic association. The individual creating art not to satisfy personal ambition but to serenely and openly express the universe as he or she experiences it inevitably develops an inclusive attitude i.e. that art should cornmunicate with and include as wide a range of audience members as possible. Universal feeling being inclusive rather than exclusive, the artist also seeks out the possibility of aesthetic enhancement through collective association with other like-minded individuals. This sets the basis for cooperative artistic efforts,
4. Universality of planet art includes past and future in present moment. Art being the expression of energy, the great monuments of past art are actually present moments in the expressive connective tissue of planet art. The pyramid structures of Giza, Teotihuacan, Borobadur; the Ajanta caves; the Acropolis; Chartres Cathedral; Chinese landscape painting; the Mosques of Isfahan all comprise a network of points of aesthetic transmission. The energy of which they are a repository continues to broadcast. Their transmissions are nutrients adding to the health of the organism. Their form and structure provide keys to the development of the post-industrial planet art system. New forms such as radiosonic architecture (combining visual light structure and sound) integrate past energy and future vision. Future vision is simply that which is born out of a concern for what will benefit the greatest number of people for as many generations to come as is conceivable.
5. The recognition of art as a planetary network vital to the functioning of the human organism considered as an interrelated whole is a factor in establishing the basis for a new planetary social order. The planetary organism has been mutating beyond its present anarchic, pre-holistic limitations and planet art is actually a tool facilitating the present transformation. The primacy of art will be established and new, more healthy and beneficial modes of living will replace the sterile assembly line activities of the Industrial Transition. Making full use of the education and leisure activities made possible by computer technology, planet art provides non-threatening forms of contemplation and action. Drawing on lessons learned from the excesses of ancient monarchy and industrial democracy, planet art can present aesthetic forms rooted in organic hierarchical patterns of nature. Utilizing electronic communications it can monitor these visions on a global scale. Thus, while we have entered a prolonged stage of political anarchy and barbarism, planet art can present a unified vision. This will be of immense help in the long period of reconstruction that lies ahead.
6. Those forming into Planet Art Associations must do so through a common regard for the deeply spiritual nature of humankind. Without this faith in humanity's basic goodness and capacity for transformation, planet art will falter on the shoals of war and the selfish crimes of the past.
These are the main points of the Planet Art Bulletin of 1987. Cautiously transmitted through a loosely connected consortium of Planet Art Associations, these measures provided a large degree of positive vision and spiritual delight through the Seven Dark Centuries which preceded the formation of the Planetary Assembly of Earth Guardians, when a total flowering of planet art finally took place. Finally reconciled with the Global Council on Energy Transformations, the Planet Art Association may now safely declare that Planet Earth has been realized as a work of art.
PAEG, Central Council
Summer Solstice, 735 AH (After Hiroshima)
page 134
Within the EARTH we know
there is an other EARTH
This other EARTH
knows us
though we know it not
to make known this other EARTH
this present EARTH now opens out
and like a flower that has given all
provided every bee its suck dis
integrates
its petals over-ripe
blown apart
swept away
are now messages
carried by a strange and ancient wind
to land as fragments of time regained
on who-knows-what other worlds
And in its stead
this other EARTH
now stands revealed
not a flower like the last
but as a crystal this other EARTH
both new
and yet without beginning
scintillates
its pattern
Geometries of secrets
sown by millenial star-gazers
spontaneously Push through
the crust of illusion
separating past from future
This other EARTH beckons
a home rIlOre familiar than the suburban ravage
of Plywood and cement
we now call home
this other EARTH
0 bounteous crystal gridwork
veins of light connecting sea and
mountain cloud
waiting so long to become VISIBLE
at last pierces the dark tent of sleep
where a race of AMNESIACS
struggleS to ascend
the luminous sound cloud-ladder
leading to the once-and-always
Palace
Of Universal memory
within this EARTH
there is an other EARTH
crystal liberation of no-more self
the sound so pure
that rainbows cease to disappear